Where did she get that hat?

Written by Jill Penton-Browne

One spring day in 1993 I joined Simone Mirman in her Menton home for an afternoon of tea and memories. Pushing eighty, she was a stimulating talker and took me through her unusual career. From her schooldays when she had already decided she would be a milliner through her sudden departure for London in her mid-twenties with a boyfriend deemed “not the right sort” by her snobbish parents to her years as an habituée of Buckingham Palace. Her biggest stroke of luck, she tells me, was being taken on as a trainee by Schiaparelli in Paris. When she crossed the Channel, arriving in England “without a word of the language”, she was quickly hired to work in the designer’s Mayfair branch and ended up inheriting her employer’s contacts book “which was like a gift from God”.

In the early Fifties, with her husband Serge alongside as an ever efficient homme à tout faire, she opened her own studio in Chesham Place. Then came another stroke of luck. About ten years after her opening, Princess Margaret’s senior lady-in-waiting walked in one day and invited her to call at Buckingham Palace. That was to be the first of many visits as she was asked to create hats for the Queen, the Queen Mother and later also Princess Diana. Her favourite client was certainly the Queen: “She was marvellous to work with.” Simone Mirman had no trace of false modesty, assuring me that “when you see a picture of the Queen from those days in a really good hat it’s one of mine.”

I’ve seen several Mirman obituaries but none mentioned how she had (so she told me) brought about a change in Buckingham Palace protocol. “Until the mid-Sixties it was the rule that a commoner leaving the Queen’s presence had to walk out backwards. One day I was doing just that, carrying a pile of hat boxes, and I fell over. Her Majesty rushed to help me up and told me that in future I could walk out normally. Well, the word got round and soon the practise of walking backwards was abandoned. That pleased everyone.” Simone Mirman died in Menton in August, aged 96.

From Riviera Reporter Issue 130: Dec 2008/Jan 2009

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